Once Upon a Day: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  I knew it was bad when he asked me to call Dr. Humphrey for a visit. I rushed to Father’s study where he kept the only phone we had, an unusual kind, according to Jimmy—it could dial out but not ring in. Though I’d never used a phone before, I figured it out quickly and was so pleased with myself I almost forgot the urgency of my mission.

  Dr. Humphrey came by that same day. He said he was concerned, but he couldn’t make a precise diagnosis unless Father would come to the hospital for tests. I tried to persuade him, but all my attempts went nowhere. He wouldn’t leave. He said the only thing he wanted was to see his son again.

  I wrote to Jimmy. I’d been hearing from him less and less, but still, I expected a quick response given this emergency. No matter how angry he was with Father—and surprisingly, he seemed to get angrier as time went by; his recent letters were full of curses, talk of how our father had fucked him up royal and screwed up his whole life, et cetera to coarse et cetera—I couldn’t imagine that he could ignore my cry for help.

  Two weeks later, when I still hadn’t heard anything, I snuck into Father’s study again and tried to track down a phone number for Jimmy, to no avail. A week or so after that I decided there was no choice: I had to go to St. Louis and get my brother.

  I called Dr. Humphrey and asked him what to do about caring for my father. Mrs. Rosa, our housekeeper, was still with us, but she barely spoke English and she was only at the house one day a week. Dr. Humphrey sent a nurse who agreed to stay until I returned, as long as I gave her a large sum of money “up front,” which she explained meant before I left. I did so, and an hour later, dressed in what Grandmother had always called my Sunday best clothes, I walked through the door.

  Father was still asleep and I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye. I did leave him a long letter, in which I explained that I would be as careful and cautious as he’d raised me to be and promised to return to the Sanctuary very soon. I also told him I loved him, but I refused to let myself feel how true this was, knowing I would break down at the thought of how worried he would be when he discovered I was gone. But there was no choice. If the only thing he wanted was Jimmy, then I would just have to bring Jimmy home. Surely the two of us could convince Father to get the medical help that his life might depend on.

  It was a Wednesday; my plan was to return by Saturday. It was feasible. Jimmy had told me the trip there took about a day and the trip back the same. That left me one day to find my brother, and it shouldn’t take half that, I thought, since I could just give the taxi driver the return address on the most recent envelope.

  I had decided not to carry a suitcase or umbrella or even a purse, so a thief couldn’t come after me. I could wear the same clothes for three days; I’d always been a tidy person. My socks were the only things I would have to replace at some point. I had on three pairs of panties; I figured I would remove the inner pair each day and throw them out. I had the stack of money I took from Father’s desk drawer, hundreds of dollars (in case of emergency), curled together and shoved deep in the pocket of my skirt. I had my toothbrush wrapped in plastic and stuck in my sock. I had Dr. Humphrey’s phone number committed to memory, so I could call and check on Father’s condition each day. The last few letters Jimmy had written, with three separate addresses, were tucked under my sweater close to my heart. And folded into the bottom of my shoe was a page from a poem, The Faerie Queene. I’d cut it out carefully, so the binding of the book wasn’t disturbed. In the middle of the page was the line that would be my new motto: Be bold, be bold, and every where Be Bold.

  I admit I tried not to think too much about what all this boldness might entail.

  Dr. Humphrey offered me a ride in his automobile to the local bus station, and I gladly took him up on it. Jimmy had walked the dirt path all those miles, but I wasn’t as healthy, nor did I have the time to waste. I took the local bus to Raton, and then the Greyhound to Denver, and then the second Greyhound to Missouri, and then I was finally in a taxicab, probably going down the same roads my brother had gone down when he first arrived in St. Louis. And he was right: the noise was the first shock. It was stunning how loud a city was: stunning and absolutely thrilling.

  Everyone on the buses had been quietly pleasant. When people smiled at me, I acknowledged their smiles with one of my own, to be polite. After a while though, I was smiling more spontaneously. Nothing outside was bad. This was what Jimmy had been telling me for nearly two years, but I hadn’t believed him. I expected to be afraid. I was waiting to feel the dread of other people that Father felt, that he couldn’t help letting slip out now that he was too sick to keep up a brave front.

  Nothing outside was bad, and so much was astonishing. The trip across Colorado, Kansas and Missouri was wonderful, but being in the city—knowing that I was in a real city, a place with thousands and thousands of fellow creatures—was almost more exciting than I could bear. I watched the crowds moving on the sidewalks. Such colorful clothes! The variety of expressions people made! The unusual songs playing on what appeared to be giant portable radios! The black people and brown people and especially all the younger people! People of my own age and Jimmy’s!

  I’d been in the taxicab for fifteen minutes and I was feeling very bold—bold enough to speak to a total stranger. The driver had an appealing face; perhaps that was why I decided to let him be the first person in the city I spoke to. I was also proud that I had something to say to him. Some months before, Jimmy had sent me a ticket stub from a concert he’d attended. When it fell out of the envelope, I’d studied it carefully before putting it away. I knew the difference between a ticket and a stub. I knew the tickets the taxi driver had displayed were never used.

  My question was so ordinary, or so I thought, and yet the next thing I knew, the driver was not only refusing to answer, he was so angry he turned all the way around at the first stoplight to look at me with what seemed to be unmitigated hatred.

  The sudden feeling of fear struck me with the force of a blow, and yet I also felt vindicated. So this was what Father had tried to protect us from. This was why he kept us from any contact with the world outside the Sanctuary: because human beings were every bit as unpredictable as a tire swing, and just as capable of harm.

  Of course the fear was stronger than the vindication, and I squeezed my eyes tight and wished to be home harder than I’d ever wished for anything in my life. When I found myself still in the cab, I also found myself headed for the worst kind of nervous attack. My heart was already pounding so hard I felt like it would beat its way right out of my chest, when I began to steady my breathing and calm myself the way my father had taught me, the way I’d been doing since I was a very small child. I opened my mouth and began to sing.

  three

  “WHAT THE HELL? Are you all right?”

  The taxicab driver’s voice was loud. My breathing hadn’t steadied. I closed my eyes again and started over at the beginning of the song. It was one of my favorites; Jimmy had told me that I’d been singing it even before we left California.

  “‘It’s a marvelous night for a moon dance …’”

  I sang louder when I realized the driver had pulled against the curb and stopped. This wasn’t the address I’d given him. Why had he opened his door and gotten out? What was he doing now, opening my door?

  “Don’t touch me,” I managed, when he reached for my arm.

  “I just want to check your pulse.”

  “No!”

  “All right,” he said. “Put your head between your knees.”

  “Please,” I gasped, holding up my hand palm out, hoping he would back away.

  He did step back, but not enough that I could shut the door. He stood watching me as I sang the song again and again until my heart stopped thrashing and I could breathe normally.

  At some point, I had dropped my head between my knees, but not because this taxi driver had told me to. Our doctor, the one before Dr. Humphrey, had told me the same thing. I always dropped my head between my knees when
the dizziness got bad. Father used to joke that I’d sung more songs looking down at my shoes than anyone in the country.

  When I sat up straight, the driver finally shut my door and walked around to the front of the cab. He was back in the driver’s seat when I told him I was getting out now.

  “Here?”

  “How much do I owe?” I said.

  “You don’t want to get out here.”

  This road wasn’t full of colors and music and people like the streets near the bus station. It was as deserted as the land around our house, but instead of hills and trees, there were tall, ugly brown brick buildings, one after another, sitting on concrete slabs.

  Still, I was more afraid of this taxicab driver and his unpredictable anger.

  “Yes, I do,” I told him. “Please tell me the fare.”

  “Who lives here?” he said, holding up the empty envelope I’d given him with Jimmy’s most recent return address. “Who are you visiting?”

  I’d promised myself that I would say nothing about my life or plans to anyone. I remembered Father had always deflected questions about our family, whether those questions were asked by the doctor or the preacher or one of the delivery truck drivers. “It’s none of their business,” Father would say. “People are always looking for the weakness in others. It’s one of the darker traits of human nature.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” I said to the driver.

  “Fine,” he muttered, running one hand through his thick brown hair.

  “Because it’s none of your business.”

  “Whatever.”

  Whatever? I’d already given him a reason, but thinking he’d misunderstood, I repeated it.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Do you think I really care who you’re seeing?”

  If his voice had been angry, I would have jumped out of his cab right then, even though I hadn’t paid the fare. The words were angry, true, but his tone was as exhausted as Father’s now that he was sick.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m trying to keep you from walking around in that strange outfit in a bad neighborhood.” He turned around to face me. “You’re what? Eighteen? But if you insist on being a fool, be—”

  “I’m twenty-two, almost twenty-three.” The words escaped my lips before I remembered my promise, but even when I did, I couldn’t stop myself. “And my clothes are not strange. They’re very well made, the finest of their kind.”

  “That isn’t a costume?” He wasn’t smiling, but his tone was clearly amused. “You’re actually wearing that?”

  “Of course I’m wearing it. I see nothing funny here.” I paused and took a long, untroubled breath. This was a topic I knew well: Father had been talking about it as far back as I could remember. “Why must everything be modern? People think that just because something is new it’s automatically better. My clothes are modeled after a style from the fifties, but the fifties was a time of enormous hope in our country, a time when the family was the center of many people’s lives, a time—”

  “When we weren’t even born.”

  “So?” I said, because I really didn’t see what that had to do with it.

  He didn’t say anything for what felt like a long minute. He was still facing my direction, staring out the back window. I took this opportunity to look at him.

  He was a little unkempt: brown hair that needed a trim, stubble on his face that Father would have called a “five o’clock shadow” (and yet it wasn’t even ten in the morning), a button-down blue shirt that could have used an iron. Still, there was something about his face that I couldn’t help finding appealing. I wanted to call his expression “caring,” though there was certainly no reason to think he was a caring person. If anything, he kept making a point of how little he cared: first about who I was visiting (though he himself had asked the question), and now about what I was wearing and what he called my “theory of the fifties.”

  “I just want to take you where you need to be,” he said, and exhaled. “Is that all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. He turned around and started the cab. After he pulled on to the street, though, I had to ask him something.

  “Why did you call it my ‘theory’?”

  “What?”

  I sat forward a little. “ ‘Theory’ is from the Latin word theoria. It means the principles of a body of knowledge, as in a theory of art.”

  He glanced at me in the mirror. “It can also mean an assumption that hasn’t been proved.”

  “True,” I said, thinking, the man knows his Webster’s unabridged. “But that’s the way it’s used in science. I don’t see how it applies to what I was saying.”

  When he didn’t respond, I was confused, but I said, “Want to know what word I would use instead of ‘theory’?”

  “Sure, I’ll bite.”

  “Bite what?”

  “It’s just an expression.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “You’ve never heard that before?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Where did you grow up, Mars?”

  He had nice eyebrows. They were a lighter color than his hair, and not too arched. I liked looking at him in the mirror, especially as he wasn’t looking back at me. I could study him, as if the black frame of the mirror were a picture frame, and he were just a photograph of a man, as in my encyclopedias, but breathing and alive.

  “No,” I said, smiling. “And that’s no to both questions. No, I’ve never heard your expression, and no, I didn’t grow up on Mars.”

  I almost added, “because Mars isn’t inhabited,” but luckily I’d stopped myself. Father had mentioned something about moon travel in the sixties. What if there had been Mars travel in the eighties and Mars colonies now?

  He inhaled. “ ‘I’ll bite’ is like saying ‘I’ll take the bait.’”

  “As in fishing?” I’d never done it, but of course I knew what it was.

  He nodded.

  “But hold on. If what I said was the bait, and you were the fish taking it, then …” I was having trouble finishing the idea. It made no sense. “You thought hearing my answer was going to harm you in some way?”

  “Are you serious?” He ran his hand through his hair, making it even messier.

  “Wouldn’t that be the only conclusion? Unless you mean it’s a temptation. I suppose bait can be looked at that way too, but since it’s on the end of a hook, and its purpose isn’t to feed the fish, but to trick—”

  “Look, I think I have to pay attention to the road now. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I understand,” I said happily. I was starting to really like his voice, especially the way he’d said “I’m sorry.” I’d never heard anything like it. The tone reminded me of a cello. “The road is the most important thing when you’re driving. Even I know that.”

  He turned a black knob then and music came on. A car radio. Father had one in the Land Rover too, and once Jimmy had taken his keys and snuck into the Rover to listen to it. He got caught when he forgot to remove the key and the car battery died. But “dead” for batteries turned out to mean something very different from the usual meaning of “dead.” Father was able to bring it back to life with the help of red and black wires connected to the battery of one of the delivery trucks. My brother didn’t get punished of course; he never did.

  When I asked Jimmy what he’d heard on the radio, he told me he was trying to find the news and see if anything important was happening in the world. The only thing he’d heard about, he said, was a smashing pumpkin drummer who was arrested. We both thought it was strange that someone would even want to smash pumpkins, whether or not they could be arrested.

  I sat back and watched as we drove down street after street. We were still in the concrete part of the city: no trees, no flowers, lots of buildings with gaping holes where the window glass should have been. The music on the radio seemed to fit because it wasn’t at all pretty either. It sounded more like screaming than singing, but I realized that might just be me. No one can ever know
what something really sounds like or looks like or even is; I learned that when Father taught us modern physics and relativity.

  “Einstein!” I said, louder than I’d intended to, and I startled Stephen Spaulding. That was his name; I could see it on his taxi license. It sounded like the name of a poet.

  “Dammit,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound like a cello. It sounded a little out of breath, more like a squeaky violin. I wished I could ask Mr. Spaulding not to curse. Cursing made me nervous, always had.

  “It’s all right,” he said, and shook his head.

  I waited a bit. “Would you like to know why I said Einstein?”

  “What the hell,” he said, but he smiled. His first smile. “If I say no, you’ll tell me anyway.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t,” I said, grinning. He had a really beautiful smile, this Mr. Spaulding. White teeth in rows as perfect as piano keys. No overbite, like I had. Mine was a slight overbite, but still. “However, I think you’ll find it interesting. I was thinking of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and then I realized there it was again! Theory!”

  “Like the Sesame Street Word of the Day.”

  “Sesame Street?”

  “Yeah.” He turned left, and his voice grew quieter. “I never watched the show much myself, but I knew a little girl who loved all the videos.”

  “Video, meaning the picture on television, rather than the sound?”

  “You really expect me to believe you don’t know what a video is? That you’re an American in 2003 and you’ve never been in a Blockbuster?”

  He was angry again, but just like before, I heard that tired sadness in his voice that I knew so well from listening to Father. Even before he got sick, even before Jimmy left, Father sometimes sounded like this no matter how happy he claimed to be. I never understood why, and I didn’t understand now either.

  I sat up straighter and looked out the window. After a moment, Mr. Spaulding told me we were almost there.